I watched seven movies last week:
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- Cliffhanger is dumb and very forgetable, but it’s also a fairly entertaining thrill ride.
- In Which We Serve is straight-up British stiff-upper-lip World War II propagaganda, but it’s often very effective as such, and it features some good performances.
- White Men Can’t Jump sometimes feels a little rough around the edges, but it has well-observed characters and dialogue, and it’s often very fun.
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- Ministry of Fear plays initially a little like a horror movie, in which our hero wanders into a quiet English village only to discover it’s been overtaken by some kind of sinister forces. Only, in this case, it’s not body snatchers from beyond but Nazi spies. It’s gripping and suspenseful throughout.
- The One is dumb and very forgettable, full stop. It is not entertaining, and I just wanted the ride to stop.
- Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Roger Ebert wrote, “is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but [it] gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature—so odd, so valuable, so particular.”
- Spaceman is a little whispery and dull, even leaden at times. But because that seems largely by design, as deliberate as the decision to not Americanize the story and characters, the movie largely works. I’m not sure it has anything epescially deep to say—beyond,
as Robert Daniels puts it, that “some men would rather go to space and talk to a giant spider than go to therapy”—but it’s not without its share of lovely little moments.
I also re-watched Die Hard (for the who-knows-how-many-th time), following something of a John McTiernan kick I’ve been on, following along with Blank Check. I don’t think Die Hard is the greatest movie ever made, but I do think it’s a near-perfect movie, and likely the best action movie ever made. Everything in it is so deliberate without ever feeling that way, and it’s hard to imagine a better version of the movie Die Hard is trying to be.